We are a national network of women of the African Diaspora who do academic and/or community-based teaching, research, and organizing based on our education in women's studies. Rooted in the
history of of feminist consciousness within African American communities (see Beverly Guy-Sheftall's Words of Fire), we triumphantly walk the artificial line between black liberation and women's liberation politics, catching fire on all sides, yet demonstrating through our focus the power of mind over matter.

The #whateverwhenever oracle is Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind's offering to the #blacklivesmatter ride, a national movement in solidarity with young black people in Ferguson, Missouri with a vision towards a just society within which black life is cherished. Today's poem is "For My Own Protection" by Essex Hemphill from the revolutionary anthology In the Life edited by Joseph Beam.

To activate the oracle, choose a letter of the alphabet (your initials? the initials of a loved one? a letter that is speaking to you..) and read the poem for that letter aloud to yourself. If you happen to choose a letter that has no words in the original poem you get to make your own poem using only words that begin with that letter of the alphabet.